


The day I met her

by aflyingcontradiction



Series: Soaring Hawk [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Ableist Language, Disability, Disabled Character, Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Post-Apocalypse, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-10
Updated: 2017-10-10
Packaged: 2019-01-15 16:22:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12324576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aflyingcontradiction/pseuds/aflyingcontradiction
Summary: Limps has lived a slave's life in Hunter's compound for as long as she can remember. It's not a great life, but she thinks it's the best a broken thing like her can get. But then a newcomer joins the compound and with her, dreams of freedom that Limps has never dared to dream before.Inspired by the putthepromptsonpaper.tumblr.com prompt: “Sometimes the outcome is worth all the pain. And sometimes it isn’t- and for those times, you know what I say?” “….Shoot him in the thigh and never look back?” “Exactly.”





	The day I met her

I first met my mother when I was thirteen. Of course, at the time I did not know she was my mother. I did not even know I still had a mother. I had lived in the compound for as long as I could remember. But then, one day she arrived.

Hunter had called me that night and I was still sore and bleeding when I got up that morning to fetch water with the other women. We never left the compound without an armed guard. It was too dangerous out in the dusty emptiness. There were raiders and wild animals and Hunter said we were fragile and too valuable to lose. That day we were being guarded by Hog, Sabre and Fluke. But it wasn’t the men who spotted her first. It was Whisper.

She poked Ash in the side and said: “There’s someone at the waterhole. Look.”

I had to look twice to see the person crouching next to the waterhole. She was wrapped in beige cloth, making it almost impossible to spot her in front of the sandy backdrop.

The men raised their guns. The figure at the waterhole had spotted us, too, but did not run.

Instead she got up, raised her hands and waved, shouting: “Hey there, company!” 

She did not seem to be armed, but the men did not lower their guns. There was a strange lump on her back.

When we got closer, she took off the wrappings around her face and head. I could see why she was wearing a headscarf: Her red hair may as well have been a target out here.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing here, bitch! This water belongs to us!” shouted Sabre.

“Who’s us then?” she asked, completely unimpressed. 

Thinking back, this must have been the moment when I started to like her, weeks before I started to trust her.

Sabre turned his head to frown at Hog. He didn’t seem to know what to do in the face of the woman’s complete lack of fear. Hog shrugged.

“Hunter’s people!” Sabre eventually shouted.

“Oh,” said the woman. “Yeah, I’ve heard of you lot. You’re holed up somewhere nearby, then? Got any room for us over there?”

We realised what she meant by “us” when a tiny head popped out of the lump on her back. 

“What do we do, Sabre?” asked Fluke.

“We could just shoot her, I suppose.”

“Don’t shoot her, she has a kid,” gasped Ash.

“Shut up.”

“She wants to go with us. We could just take her with us,” suggested Fluke. 

“Hunter doesn’t want us picking up strays.”

“We’ve always picked up strays! Half the people in the compound were strays at one point. I was a stray you picked up,” Fluke protested.

“Well, you’re useful, though, aren’t you? She’ll be a burden, especially with the kid. She’s not even Hunter’s type. He’ll be pissed!”

“Kids grow up,” Fluke said, sounding a little stroppy. “And I think she’s hot. We can always take her home with us and see what Hunter says.” 

Hog laughed and ruffled Fluke’s hair: “Think he’ll let you have her then?”

Throughout the entire conversation, the woman stood at the waterhole with her arms crossed, staring at us. I was sure she could hear them. They weren’t bothering to whisper. But it never once showed in her face.

“Alright, alright, but if she pisses off Hunter, I’ll blame you,” Sabre said with a sigh, then turned to the woman and shouted: “Get the hell over here!” He waved his shotgun at her, as though she hadn’t just been asking to come with us. “And you lot, don’t just stand there. Go do your job.” 

The eight of us grabbed our water containers and started walking. We met the red-haired woman halfway. There was a deep frown on her face, but she didn’t seem scared. When we walked past her, she smiled at us and nodded. I kept walking. I couldn’t afford to dawdle – I was the slowest anyway and if Sabre got mad, he might tell Hunter and the last thing I wanted to do was piss off Hunter. But some of the other women stopped. 

I turned my head just in time to see Ash mouth the words: “Run. Please.” Maybe the woman hadn’t seen it, maybe she didn’t care. Either way, she paid Ash no heed. Instead, she introduced herself as “Honey” and her little kid as “Sparrow”, then asked for the other women’s names. 

“HEY!” I flinched at Sabre’s shout. “YOU’RE HERE TO WORK, GET YOUR SWEET ASSES MOVING!” 

\-------------------------------------------------

When we returned to the men with full water containers, Honey was standing in their midst, shooting Sabre a look I had last seen on Hunter’s face when he had fished a half-dead rat out of his stew the other day. Her little kid, on the other hand, was exchanging shy smiles with Fluke. 

“Alright! Let’s go!” commanded Sabre. 

I started lagging behind only moments after we had left. The others did not wait up for me. They never did. Why would they?

So I was very surprised when all of the sudden, Honey popped up next to me, accompanied by a rather harried-looking Fluke, who was clearly trying – and failing – to make her walk faster.

“You looked like you might need a hand back here,” she said and reached for one of the water containers. “You don’t look well enough to be carrying all that on your own. It’s ridiculous they make you come out here when you’re injured.”

“She’s not injured. She always limps.” 

Honey shot Fluke a scathing look as she grabbed one of my water canisters. It was clear she wouldn’t have let me refuse, even if I had truly wanted to.

“All the more reason to lend a hand,” said Honey and turned to me: “What’s your name?”

“Limps, actually,” I muttered. 

“That’s ... nice.”

“No, it’s not,” I replied. I was under no delusion about the quality of my name, but I’d grown up in the compound where nobody had the time to deal with a cripple’s issues, let alone give them a name. I’d been referred to as some variation of “The one who limps” for as long as I could remember. Eventually ‘Limps’ had stuck.

“Can I ask...?”

I knew what she was going to say and cut her off before she had a chance: “Sure you can ask, but I can’t answer. Must’ve had an accident as a toddler, before I became one of Hunter’s people, and I barely remember the time before, so nobody has a clue how it happened.”

Honey gave me a strange look, like she was trying to stare right into my brain. Her eyes were creeping me right out, so I looked at my feet instead while we kept on walking.

“You haven’t always lived with them, then?” she said, eventually.

“No. Hunter took me in when I was small, maybe four or five. Says he saved me from slavers, but I don’t really remember any of that.”

“Shame,” muttered Honey.

“No, it’s not. There’s not a single good reason for a little kid to end up in the hands of slavers. I’d rather not know.”

No idea why I said that. I didn’t even know why I was answering Honey’s questions at all. She was just a stranger. And here I was, pouring my heart out to her. I suppose I didn’t usually get the chance to do that.

I regretted being so open when I looked up for a moment and saw she was now gaping at me, her mouth wide open.

“You’re ... are you...?” 

She never finished what she was going to say. At the time I thought she was too overwhelmed by pity. I tried to walk faster to escape her. Who wanted to be pitied?

Honey did not say another word until we arrived at the compound and the guards had opened the gates for us. Then she let out a low whistle.

“Wow, this place is a mess.”

“Shut up,” growled Sabre and poked her in the back with his shotgun, right below where she was carrying Sparrow. Ash glared at him.

“She’s not wrong, though,” muttered Hog.

It hadn’t always looked like this, but just a month before, we had been attacked by an unusually large and unusually well-organised band of raiders. They had appeared out of nowhere and disappeared just as fast, taking a dozen lives and most of our supplies and leaving devastation in their wake. We had been living on ever smaller rations ever since and trying desperately to rebuild, but with only twenty-two people left progress was slow.

It looked like Fluke was about to tell Honey just that, but Sabre was already pushing her along in the direction of Hunter’s barracks. 

I went to the women’s hut with the others to rest for as long as I could before I was needed somewhere. 

\-------------------------------------------------

I didn’t see Honey and Sparrow again until late that night, when Honey entered the women’s hut, carrying a thoroughly exhausted looking Sparrow in her arms. She didn’t look as haughty as she had this morning. Her brow was furrowed and she had a brand-new cut on her lip.

Nobody said anything, but Clarity and Foxy started whispering to each other in the far corner of the hut the moment Honey came in the door. Ash waved her over to the empty mattress between the two of us where Lis had slept until a month before. 

Honey looked at me and smiled. I quickly hid my crooked leg under a tattered blanket before she could comment on it.

“You can sleep here,” whispered Ash. “I know it’s terrifying out there, but you’re safe here.”

Honey set Sparrow down on the raggedy old mattress where he immediately fell asleep, curled into a ball like a kitten. I wondered whether anyone had told Honey about the raid. 

“We’ll wake you up in the morning.”

“That’s if Hunter doesn’t call for you in the night. He’ll probably want to try you out,” said Feathers.

“He won’t call for her. She’s old and used up,” said Clarity. 

“It’s not like he has a lot of options. He’ll even make do with Limps these days!” commented Foxy. “So why not her?”

I expected Honey to react, but she didn’t even acknowledge the insults. Instead, she just stared at me again with that look of pity in her face. And then, for a moment, there was a flash of something else that I couldn’t quite place. Irritation, maybe?

I pulled the covers over my face and pretended not to have noticed. I heard Whisper hiss: “Will you shut up, you jealous cows, people are trying to sleep here.”

It was easy to block out the ensuing argument. I was used to falling asleep to the sound of insults flying. I rolled up underneath my blanket and pretended I didn’t exist.

I had almost drifted off, when something poked me in the side and whispered: “Limps?”

“Hm?”

“Do you like living here?”

I pulled back the blanket and looked at Honey. In the dim light of Ash’s candle I could see she was leaning on one elbow and had her other arm wrapped around Sparrow, who was smiling in his sleep. Lucky kid. 

It was an odd question. It seemed as absurd as asking ‘Do you like that the sky is blue?’ or ‘Do you like that water is wet?’ What was the use of having an opinion on something like that? I did not know what to answer, so I just sat up and shrugged.

She clearly wasn’t satisfied: “But do you like Hunter?”

I shrugged again. I would have preferred to sleep sooner rather than later, just in case Hunter decided to wake me up again. Besides, this was awkward.

“He treats you like shit! All of you.”

“That’s not true. He saved me. He feeds us.”

“He hurts you, doesn’t he?”

“He feeds us,” I answered again. “And protects us.” 

“Protects you from what, exactly? Raiders? Because if that’s not the shoddiest protection I have ever...”

“I want to sleep now.” I pulled my blanket over my head and tried to put that odd conversation out of my mind. 

\-------------------------------------------------

I did not succeed. Maybe I would have, if Hunter had not called for Ash that night and if she hadn’t returned crying. Maybe I would have just ignored it and slept on like the others – like we always did. But Ash’s return had woken up Sparrow and his little voice pierced the darkness like a dagger: “Mummy, why is she crying?”

“She’s crying because a bad man hurt her.” 

Honey wasn’t even trying to keep her voice down.

I heard Ash gasp in the darkness: “Oh, don’t say that.”

“Why did the bad man hurt you?” Sparrow asked.

“I ... I ... I was bad and upset him.”

“That’s no reason and you know it,” said Honey. “He treats all of you like he owns you.”

“That’s stupid,” piped up Sparrow. “Nobody can own people. My body and my mind belong to me and anyone who says different is a liar!”

“That’s right,” said Honey somewhat proudly.

“It’s fine. He feeds us. He protects us.”

“You lot keep telling me that, but you all look like you haven’t had a square meal in weeks and from what I’ve seen of your dear leader so far, you need protection from him more than anything else.”

“He takes care of us.”

“Oh, stop kidding yourself. I expect it from her. She has never had the chance to know freedom. But you know better. I can see it in your eyes.”

It took me a moment to realise that the “she” Honey was talking about was me. She must have thought that just because I hadn’t moved a muscle, I was still asleep.

“But you came here because you wanted to! Why did you ask to come here if you think it’s so horrible?” 

Ash was sobbing pretty loudly at this point and I had no idea how Honey could have possibly thought I was asleep. The racket would have woken up the dead!

“I have my reasons,” Honey responded in a calm, quiet voice. “Some things are worth the pain.”

“Exactly! Some things are worth the pain,” repeated Ash, still sobbing.

“But is that really true for you? Just think about it.”

Things went quiet after that. I could still hear Ash sob for a while, but eventually I drifted off to sleep. 

\-------------------------------------------------

I wasn’t sure if Ash ended up thinking about it, but I sure did. Not at first. I was too busy cutting wood, trying to make soup as thin as tears stretch to feed twenty-four people, fetching water, the usual. But Honey was working with us now and my eyes and thoughts kept wandering over to where she was working and Sparrow was playing happily in the dust or else running back and forth fetching things.

She was different from the rest of us. There was a radiance about her and it was not just her hair. It took me a while to realise that she held herself very differently. The rest of us – we kept our heads low, our shoulders tense, our mouths shut and when one of the men approached, we cowered. 

But Honey held her head high, was unafraid to comment on what was going on around her, and her withering glare seemed to create an invisible barrier around her that most of the men were afraid to cross. Maybe they, too, were confused by a creature as strange as Honey. 

There seemed to be only two men in the compound who were unafraid to get close to her, Fluke and Hunter. 

Fluke seemed to have developed something of a crush on Honey, even though she could easily have been his mother. Whenever he wasn’t otherwise occupied, he would hover around her, lending a helping hand with her work or playing and joking with Sparrow. Whenever she thanked him, he would grin sheepishly and turn bright red. I had never seen him like that before. 

Hunter, on the other hand, was far less polite. It seemed both Sabre and Clarity had been wrong and Honey actually was his type after all. Time and again, when I woke up those next few weeks and turned to her mattress, only Sparrow was sleeping there. The next morning she would usually sport a bright purple bruise somewhere. I was starting to worry about her, especially when I heard Clarity and Foxy mutter about how Hunter was going to kill her one of these days if she didn’t learn to keep her tongue in check. But Honey seemed completely unfazed by it all. She kept playing with her kid, chatting with Fluke, working with her head held high. How did she do it?

\-------------------------------------------------

It wasn’t until some weeks later when we were working side by side fixing one of the barracks that had been destroyed that I realised Honey had been watching me, too. I glanced her way to see what she was doing and met her curious gaze. She quickly rearranged her face into a friendly smile. I was so startled that, in my urge to look away as quickly as possible, I dropped the hammer I had been holding.

I bent to pick it up and when I looked up again, Honey was standing right next to me, holding up a box of nails: “I’m sorry I startled you. I shouldn’t have stared.” 

“It’s okay,” I muttered. 

She started working right next to me and it was hard to concentrate on work when all I really wanted to do was stare at her. So many questions were bubbling to the forefront of my mind and it took more power than I had to keep them in. Eventually one just burst out: “What’s it like? Out there, I mean.” 

I waved vaguely in the direction of the gate. Honey smiled at me.

“It’s amazing.”

I snorted in disbelief. 

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, it’s dangerous. You have to learn how to get by on your own. Sometimes you don’t know where your next meal will come from and some nights you can’t sleep because if you do, you might never wake up. But when you’re out there with nothing but the sky above you and the ground below your feet and the company of your own thoughts and ...” 

Honey looked over at Sparrow who was building a tower out of left-over bits of wood and smiled. 

“And you never know what’s waiting for you the next day, what you might see, whom you might meet...” 

She turned her eyes to the sky with a wistful smile.

I tried to imagine seeing different things, meeting different people, but all I could see in my mind were the faces of Hunter’s people and endless dust under an endless sky. Nothing ever changed here. Sure, you didn’t know whether Hunter would call for you that night or what work you’d be told to do the next morning, but everything had happened before. Everything would happen again. The raiders’ attack had been the first thing to surprise me since the first time Hunter had called for me. I wondered whether some of the surprises out there beyond the compound walls were actually nice. They had to be or Honey’s eyes would not have looked so sad.

“You miss it, don’t you?” I asked.

“Yes, I do,” said Honey. 

“Why did you ask to come with us? You hate it here.”

“You hate it here, too, don’t you? Why do you stay?”

“I don’t have a choice!” I snapped. I frowned. I hadn’t really meant to say that. It had just happened somehow. Quickly, I added: “And besides, I don’t hate it here.”

“Do you like it here, then?”

There it was again, that odd question.

“That’s not fair! You can’t just answer a question with another question.”

She gave me an odd look. Had I offended her? Should I apologise? 

But then she put a hand on my shoulder and said: “Sometimes the outcome is worth all the pain.”

“The outcome?” I looked around us. What could she possibly want here? Safety? But she had said it herself, if there was anything we needed protection from, it was Hunter himself.

“Oi! Less yakking, more working over there!” Sabre was approaching. “And you!”

“Who?” asked Honey.

“You!” 

“You’d cause fewer misunderstandings if you used our names, you know.”

“Watch your mouth,” growled Sabre.

I flinched. I’d seen him pistol-whip people for less than that. But Honey looked at me and shrugged, as if to say ‘Oh well, what can you do’, then asked: “You wanted to talk to me then?”

“Yeah, Fluke said you knew shit about cars.”

“Depends on your definition of ‘shit’.”

“Hunter’s jeep’s fucked and Fluke’s being useless as usual. Said you could help.”

I watched Honey as she walked over to the jeep to join Fluke and pondered her question – “Do you like it here, then?” – until Sabre saw me staring and shouted: “OI! GET BACK TO WORK!”

\-------------------------------------------------

That evening, when I was walking back to the women’s hut, I walked past Ash, who was dragging a large pot of soup in the direction of Hunter’s barracks. She looked pale and gaunt in her raggedy dress. Sweat was dripping off her brow. She had a big scratch down one cheek. Everything about her looked exhausted and ready to collapse. Did I look like that, too?

“Ash?”

She flinched and a bit of soup slopped over the edge of the pot and trickled down into the dust. 

“Hm?”

It took me a moment to find the words I was looking for. I saw Ash frown in annoyance. 

“What’s the matter?”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Can’t it wait till later? I’m busy.”

“It’s just a really quick question.”

“Okay – I guess...” she replied with hesitation.

“If you had the chance to leave, would you?”

The annoyance faded from her face and was replaced first with surprise, then with confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“If you had the chance to leave the compound and go ... go elsewhere ... go out there, would you?”

“No,” she replied, almost a little too fast. She paused, picked up the soup pot and cleared her throat. Then she repeated: “No, of course not.”

“Aren’t you curious about what’s out there?”

Ash bit her lip, then shook her head: “I know what’s out there. And I know I’m not strong enough for it. I wouldn’t last a day. It’s like Hunter says, we’re fragile, we can’t be out there on our own. Imagine falling into the hands of raiders without anyone to defend you.” Ash shuddered.

“Honey has survived out there.”

“Well, that’s Honey, though. And even she begged to be let in here.”

“She didn’t beg. And if she can survive, then why couldn’t...”

For a moment ‘I’ was dancing on my tongue before I swallowed it down and said quickly: “Why couldn’t you? I mean, just in theory...”

But Ash must have noticed something, because she gave me a really strange smile and said: “What about you?” 

“Huh?”

“If you had the chance to leave, would you?”

The answer burst out of me before I even realised I had thought about it: “Yes. Yes, I would.” 

And then, when Ash had long disappeared in Hunter’s barracks, I added: “I’m sick of this.”

I wasn’t sure where that had come from, but looking around me, I knew it was true.

“I’m sick of this,” I whispered again. “I’m sick of all this ... this ... fucking bullshit.” I wanted to scream it to the ever-darkening sky, but that would have been really dumb, so I swallowed the scream and went inside.

\-------------------------------------------------

The next weeks might have been the most difficult of my life in the compound. Now that I had decided I hated it here, the daily drudgery and the nightly waiting became torture. Whenever I passed the gate, I would stare out at the emptiness beyond, wondering what else lay out there until someone shouted at me to get back to work or I pulled myself out of my trance just in time to avoid a slap to the back of my head. At night I lay awake wondering if someone like me could make it out there. I couldn’t fight, I couldn’t run, I’d be a walking target, wouldn’t I? And what was the use of thinking about all of this shit? I’d never ever leave the compound anyway.

Had I not been so busy pitying myself, I might have noticed something strange was happening around me. 

I might have realised that Fluke and Honey constantly whispering with each other in hidden corners was not, in fact, a sign of Honey implausibly returning Fluke’s affection. 

I might have taken the games Fluke kept playing with Sparrow – “Race you to the jeep? Ready, set, GO!” – for more than childish games. 

I might have listened up when Whisper came running into the women’s hut shouting about food going missing, only to be told by Ash that Hunter had just been hungrier than usual, that was all there was to it, and to stop crying, the men would go on a long hunting trip soon and come back with lots of food. But my mind was clogged up with misery. I couldn’t think straight.

After the night that would change my life forever, it actually took me several days to realise that Honey had been planning it all for a long time. But then, everything went so fast that night that I barely had time to think.

I’d exhausted myself imagining strange lands that I would never visit and was, surprisingly, fast asleep when I was shaken awake rather roughly by Fluke, who hissed: “Hey, wake up, Hunter wants you!”

I did not know whether to groan or cry. Ironically, since I had started daydreaming about places that weren’t hell and boredom at once, I had not been able to make my mind go blank when Hunter did whatever he felt like doing with my body. And it fucking hurt. And he didn’t fucking care that it did. I just wanted to go back to sleep.

As I stumbled out of the women’s hut, I wondered whether Fluke was having a particularly bad day, because I was pretty sure I had just seen him aim a kick at Honey. Honey, of all people! Maybe they’d had a fight. But Sparrow was hidden under the same blanket! He could have kicked the little kid! Fluke usually wasn’t the type for petty cruelty. I gave him a confused look.

“Well, get your fucking ass moving!” 

Yes, he was clearly having a bad day. I did as he said and ran, out of the women’s hut, across the square to Hunter’s barracks. 

I pulled aside the curtain in his door frame, my eyes downcast, both so I didn’t have to look at his shit-eating grin and so there wouldn’t be anything in my face he might misinterpret as cheek and punish with a backhand slap or worse.

I must have jumped about a foot high when someone touched my shoulder from behind.  
Hunter seemed surprised, too: “I didn’t call for you!”

It was Honey. Her smile was so demure it sent a shiver down my spine and when she began to talk, her voice was so soft that for a moment I wondered, unreasonably, whether Honey had an identical twin stashed away somewhere: “I know you didn’t. I just wanted to ... to thank you. Tonight. For all that you have done for me and my son. I know I’ve been ungrateful. But if you want me to leave...”

“Oh no, no, no.” I wasn’t looking but I could hear the smugness in his voice. “You stay here.”

How the hell did Hunter not see through her act? Obviously she was just doing this to spare me some pain. Not that I had a clue why she would do that. After all, she didn’t owe me anything. And fuck, he was going to hurt her a lot, judging by his voice. I was impressed that she actually had the guts to approach him when he beckoned her over to his bed. Impressed and really confused. What could I have possibly done to deserve this?

When Honey slipped off her top, I averted my eyes. I would have loved to leave, but Hunter hadn’t told me to. I didn’t want to see this.

A few seconds later, a scream made my head snap back up. 

I had expected screaming. 

I just hadn’t expected it to come from Hunter. 

In the split second before a topless blood-smeared Honey grabbed me by the arm, I saw his face. One of his cheeks was torn open up to his ear and the shiv – made of a sharpened nail, so simple – was still stuck in his face. He seemed dazed by the pain and surprise. 

“Come on!” Honey shouted.

She had grabbed Hunter’s shotgun, the one he always kept loaded next to his bed, but she didn’t shoot. She just ran. And I ran after her.

I didn’t really know where we were going until we had reached the jeep. 

“Shit,” I gasped. Fluke was waiting right beside it. He was holding a gun.

“It’s okay. He’s with us. Hurry.”

It was all going too fast to process. I stopped in my tracks. There was a rushing sound in my ears. I only barely heard Fluke say something about how she didn’t want to go, she was too afraid. I thought he meant me until he said: “I’m staying. Ash needs me. And the others. They need someone to look out for them.”

“They’ll kill you.”

“I’ll say you threatened me. Now get the fuck...oh shit.”

I turned to see Hunter staggering toward us. There was blood all over his naked chest and he was screaming incoherently. It was a horrible, gurgling sound. My hands flew to my ears before I could stop them. I could only see Honey mouthing “Oh fuck”. Then she raised her shotgun and aimed. There was a loud blast and a cloud of blood in the dust.

The next thing I knew I was on the passenger seat of the jeep, barrelling through the gate of the compound at full speed.

\-------------------------------------------------

I don’t think I passed out or anything, because I still remember hearing a tiny voice from underneath the backseat going: “I won, mummy! Nobody found me!” but not much else. I must have gotten lost in the vastness of the night around me and forgotten I was a person for a while.

I didn’t really come to until the car stopped and Honey said more to herself than to me: “We’re out of gas, we’ll have to walk from here.” She slipped back into her stained shirt. The colour of blood soaked right through the fabric. The sun was already high up in the sky, burning down on us at that point. We must have driven for hours.

“Are you okay?” asked Honey softly, touching my shoulder.

“I guess,” I answered. 

I turned to look at Sparrow. He smiled at me. Barely old enough to walk and talk. Completely unfazed. What had he seen out here in his short life?

“Yeah, that was a little closer than I wanted it to be. Got some wires crossed with Fluke and Ash there. Sorry for the grisly display.”

“It’s okay.”

Honey started unpacking the back of the car. It looked like she had stolen enough supplies from the compound to last the three of us a couple of days. There were several backpacks stuffed full of food, water and tools. I thought I saw some shotgun ammunition, too. No idea how she had gotten her hands on that, we women had never been allowed anywhere near the guns or ammo. Maybe Fluke had helped her. How on earth had she convinced him? 

She shouldered the shotgun, then handed me a heavy backpack. I stumbled a bit as I took it, but quickly recovered.

“No worries, we can walk slowly. They won’t catch up. No idea if they’ll even try to. They’ll probably be too busy figuring out what just happened.”

“Mummy?” Even Sparrow was carrying a backpack. It was about half the size of his whole body. “Is the bad man dead?”

“Yeah, the bad man’s dead.”

“That’s good.”

Honey sighed. “You know,” she said to me, “if we could have gotten away without killing him, I would have preferred that. I don’t like killing.” And then, as an afterthought, she added: “I think most people don’t.”

I searched awkwardly for something to say, spotted a water bottle poking out of Honey’s backpack and asked: “Will we have enough water? Our waterhole is the only one for miles and miles.” 

“It’s not. There’s a river about two days’ walk from here. We’ll be fine until then.”

“A river?” 

“It’s water that moves!” piped up Sparrow.

“I know what a river is,” I replied. I tried to imagine what it would look like, but the image just would not form in my mind. “I’ve just never seen one, that’s all.”

“Oh, you’ll see a lot of things they didn’t have in the compound. Trees. Flowers. Leaders who aren’t complete assholes.”

“Those exist?” I asked.

“I’m glad you can joke already.”

I didn’t bother to point out I hadn’t been joking.

\-------------------------------------------------

We walked for hours until Sparrow simply said: “Mummy, I’m tired” and dropped to the ground, refusing to walk even one more step.

“Yes, let’s rest.”

“Right here?” I looked around. We were in the middle of nowhere. “Isn’t it a bit exposed?”

“I’ll keep watch, if you want to sleep.”

“Thanks.”

I tried to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. The jumble of thoughts in my head was much too loud. 

Eventually I gave up. I sat up and looked at Honey, who was sitting next to me, the shotgun lying next to her stretched legs. 

“Why did you take me with you?”

Honey frowned. “Ash told me you wanted to leave. She wasn’t lying to me, was she?”

“No. No, she wasn’t. I did want to leave. But why me? What about everyone else? I’ve done nothing for you. You don’t even know if you can trust me. And I’m a cripple! I’ll just slow you down. And I don’t know how to survive out here. You could have taken Fluke with you, he could have been useful out here. Not like me.”

“You’re stronger than you think.”

“Bullshit.” 

“You’ve gone through years of abuse at the hand of those bastards back there and you’re still willing to fight.”

“Yeah, and that still doesn’t explain a damn thing,” I said.

That’s when she told me. She said it in such a matter of fact way that at first I thought she was speaking in metaphors: “It’s because I am your mother.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Honey, I’m flattered and all, but you should’ve tried mothering someone whose weakness wouldn’t put your actual child in danger.” 

“You don’t understand. You are my actual child.”

She spoke with so much sincerity that it made me shiver. I was sure she had gone crazy and didn’t dare contradict her, when she said: “I gave birth to you, just like I gave birth to Sparrow.”

Maybe she noticed the look of disbelief and fear in my face. She definitely noticed me flinch back when she tried to put her hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t be scared. I know it sounds mad, but please, let me explain. I lost you. I’ve been looking for you for so long. And now I’ve finally found you. It must be you.”

That wasn’t exactly reassuring. Had she not sounded so calm – and had she not been the one with the shotgun while I was the one with the limp – I might have tried to run. But as it was, I just sat there, with my arms wrapped around me, and listened in silence.

“I’m not really sure where to start. I suppose when you were born is a good place. I was still young when I had you. Your father ... he was not a good man, but I didn’t realise that until it was too late. I thought he protected me because he loved me. But he just wanted to own me. I think some of the people back in Hunter’s compound are making the same mistake. But I figured it out when you broke your leg.”

I stroked my misshapen leg. 

“We’d been starving for a while and we came across this farm. We snuck in through the fence ... you don’t care about the details, do you? Anyway, they were not exactly happy to share. They caught us. We ran. They shot at us. I was carrying you in my arms. You were only two years old. We rolled down this steep, rocky slope to escape. Your father and I ended up with our share of scratches and bruises, but you came down badly. And neither of us had any clue how to fix you or how to set a leg properly. For a while, I thought you wouldn’t make it. But you did. And that’s when he showed his true colours.”

I tasted blood and noticed I had been scraping my bottom lip with my teeth.

“He said we should abandon you, that even as you grew up, you’d always be holding us back, putting us in danger, that you were useless to us and to yourself. That it would be merciful to just leave you at some settlement as you slept and let the people there deal with you. 

I wouldn’t have any of it, of course. You’re my daughter! I wouldn’t have given you up for anything. I tried to convince him we could take care of you. We’d just have to walk a little slower. Or find some other transportation somewhere. A car or a cart. Some people had those. I told him it’d be years before you were too heavy to carry. I’d carry you everywhere if I had to. Maybe we’d find a safe place and settle down before it ever became a problem. I thought I’d talked some sense into him or I would never have let you out of my sight.”

I saw tears glistening in her eyes.

“I woke up one morning and you were gone. So was he. He came back a few hours later, with a pittance of food but without you. I completely lost it. Started punching and kicking and biting him. He hit me back, of course, but ... I was beyond pain or fear at the time. I managed to wrestle his gun from him. Got him to tell me what he’d done to you. He admitted he’d sold you. And then...”

“Then?” I asked. 

“Then I aimed the gun at his leg and fired. It went right through his thigh. I don’t know if he survived. I was gone before he ever stopped screaming. And then I started tracking the slavers down. They were in a convoy with cars and I was on foot. They didn’t have to worry much about safety, but I did. So, of course, they had a massive head start. But I tracked them down.”

“How?” I asked.

“Easy. They’re slavers. They need to be where other people are, to buy, to kidnap, to sell. So I just went from settlement to settlement. Mostly people are willing to give you information, sometimes freely, sometimes in exchange for work, or sex or ... well, I’ve done some things I’m not proud of.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. I knew what I was getting myself into. Most kindness doesn’t come without strings attached. I figured that one out pretty fast. The thing is that you can’t just accept it like the lot of you did over at Hunter’s compound. You’ve got to really think about it. Really consider it. Is the price I’m paying too high for the reward? Is what I’m being forced to do really worth it? You’ve got to keep your goal in mind. Even if all you’re trying to do is survive. Sometimes the outcome is worth all the pain.”

She stopped and sighed: “And sometimes it isn’t.” 

She had been staring into the distance for a while, but now she looked straight at me: “And for those times, you know what I say?”

She seemed to expect an answer, so I answered the first thing that came to mind: “... Shoot him in the thigh and never look back?”

“Exactly!” Honey chuckled. “You know, you’re very much like me.”

“Ah, bullshit.” I knew I was blushing, so I turned away from her to stare out into a vastness I had never thought I’d see. 

For a while, there was nothing but silence, broken only by Sparrow’s little snores and, somewhere in the distance, the hooting calls of a bird.

Then Honey spoke up again: “I’m sorry it took me so long to find you. I tried my best, but my body gave out before my mind did. I just collapsed one day. I might have died. But I was lucky. A band of nomads found me.”

“Nomads?”

“Yeah, not just strays and scavengers like me. Real proper nomads like those of the old stories.”

“I don’t think I know those stories,” I pointed out.

“Well, they raise animals. Goats. They sell some of them, but mostly they live off the goats themselves. Travel to make sure there’s always green pastures nearby, you know. And they took me in. Turns out I had what they call the “Stone plague”.”

“What’s that?”

“It makes your limbs turn to stone.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “No way.”

“Well, not literally. But if you survive the fever, your arms and legs might not obey your brain afterwards. You have to relearn how to move them from scratch. It took me nearly a year to learn how to walk again, so of course I couldn’t just leave the nomads and go looking for you. And by the time I could have, I had fallen in love with Soul. Sparrow’s father. I should have just left, but ... it was hard. He was the best man I had ever met. He was loving, kind, always there to help me when I needed it. He actually cried from joy when I told him I was pregnant. Of course, that meant I had to stay for another nine months and then Sparrow was too little and...”

“You know you don’t need to make excuses, right?” I interrupted her. “Anyone else would’ve just given up on me by that point.” I didn’t add that maybe she should have. Maybe she should have just replaced me with Sparrow and forgotten about me.

“Maybe some would have. But I was never going to and I am truly sorry from the bottom of my heart that it took me so long to find you.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “How did you find me in the end?” I hoped she wasn’t about to tell me she had left that safe life full of love that she had just described just for ... well ... me. 

“I told Soul I could not leave you wherever you were now. I had to at least make sure you weren’t suffering, didn’t I? He wanted to come with me, but he couldn’t. His family needed him.”

So it was true. She had left for me. “But what about you and Sparrow?” 

“I was still nursing Sparrow when I left and I just couldn’t bear to leave him. He’s so attached to me.”

“But...”

“Soul was just doing his duty and he knew I could take care of myself and Sparrow. Don’t blame him.”

“I’m not.”

“Don’t blame yourself either.”

I cringed. She noticed, but she didn’t comment: “So to make a long story short, I came across a settlement that the slavers had passed through years before. Someone there remembered you.”

“Remembered me? How?”

“They’d tried to sell you there. You and a bunch of others. You’re memorable.”

“Yeah, I suppose people rarely see a kid with such a fucked-up leg, huh?”

Honey smiled. “Sure, if you want to be cynical. They felt sorry for you, but they couldn’t afford to spend resources on slaves they didn’t need. Turns out some weeks later some of the slavers came back through the town. They looked a lot worse for wear. Injured. Afraid. Apparently they’d had a run-in with Hunter’s lot. You and the other slaves were gone. When they told me that, I was afraid you were dead. But I had to make sure.”

“So that’s why you asked to join ...”, for a moment I was going to say ‘us’ but then I remembered I was no longer one of Hunter’s people and, for that matter, Hunter was probably dead by now, “the compound. You wanted to see if they knew what had happened to me and joining them was the only way to find out.”

“Yes. None of you understood, of course, when I said that some things are worth the pain.”

“But they weren’t!” I burst out. 

Sparrow shifted in his sleep and moaned a little. 

“Sorry. But they weren’t,” I said in a lower voice. “They could have easily killed you and your son. Or they might have captured you and hurt you! Fuck, Hunter did hurt you. I know he did. And you left the love of your life! And for what? Me? I mean, you’ve got to admit that’s ridiculous. I’m useless! And maybe I’m not even your daughter. Maybe I’m just some other cripple who just happened to be around.”

“Oh, you’re as stubborn as your mother, aren’t you? I knew the moment I saw you. How could I not? You’re my child! And I knew that Hunter and his people wouldn’t kill me. Knowing how to read people is what’s kept me alive through the years. And as for Soul, I tracked down a bunch of slavers I had never met to find you. Don’t you think I can track down the people I travelled with for years? I have no doubt we’ll see each other again.” Honey’s voice was stern, but not angry. “And for the love of fuck, stop saying you’re useless.”

“But ... my leg.”

“Forget the bullshit they taught you back there. Do you really think a person’s value is determined by how many working limbs they have? Hunter had four of them and he was a fucking parasite sucking other people dry to live! Do you think he was a good person?”

I thought for a moment. “Well, I guess not. But ... only the strongest survive.”

“Enough with the buts! You can survive out here. I’ll fucking teach you how to survive out here. Strength is more than just your body. It’s knowing what you can do with what you have and what you’re willing to pay for what you want. Carving out a niche for yourself! Hunter made you think that physical strength is the only thing that counts because that was all that asshole had! He had you lot nice and brainwashed, thinking you couldn’t do anything without him, when every single one of you would have been better off if he had never existed! God, they never even gave you a proper name! It’s no fucking wonder you don’t trust yourself to make it. But at least trust me when I tell you that you can! I know you can. I’ve seen others like you make it! For heaven’s sake, Soul’s mother has been blind for half her life and she’s a respected leader among the nomads. Don’t give up before you’ve even tried.”

She kept ranting at me for a while. I think she found some other examples of successful cripples she had met on her journey. But the moment she mentioned my name, everything else became a blur. She was still talking when I couldn’t stand it anymore and just cut her off in the middle of her rant: “Did I have a name?”

She paused and looked confused for a moment. “Huh?”

“When I was with you! Did you name me?”

She smiled and nodded. “Of course I did. I named you Hawk. I wanted my baby to soar.”

“Hawk,” I said softly. 

“If you don’t like it, we can find another name for you. Together.”

“Hawk,” I whispered again, tasting the name on my tongue. It tasted sweet. I imagined a hawk in flight, gliding over meadows, rivers, mountains. Going wherever it pleased. Soaring.

I smiled.


End file.
